As a job candidate you need to make sure that no one is sending your resume to a company without your permission! That means your recruiter needs to tell you the name of the company that they want to send your resume to.
Three good reasons are:
- Has your resume been submitted to ABC Company within the past year?
- Do you have any issues with ABC Company?
- Would you be interested in this job description with ABC Company?
Some recruiters have relationships with hiring managers who are always looking for top talent regardless to whether they have an open position or not. This too needs to be explained to you up front before the recruiter sends your resume. This is what we call “clearing the candidate”.
I can’t get over the fact that recruiters, I use the term recruiters “loosely”, still send resumes without clearing their candidates. An ethical recruiter clears their candidates every time. The problem is that certain recruiters have weak relationships all around and they are simply trying to make something happen for themselves, but what ends up happening is the job candidate gets hurt. If your resume makes it to the same place by two different recruiters then it will become a problem for you. Two recruiters, same job, both recruiters say that they are working with you. Icarumba! You see the company is going to need to get to the bottom of this to determine who gets the credit if you happen to get the job. You might not even get that far. The last thing a company wants is a fight over who is really the one working with you on this job. It creates a negative reaction from all parties and starts you off on the wrong foot regardless to what you may think.
Today, more than ever before, you need to protect your resume. There are people out there that if they were to get a hold of your resume would send it all over the place. Some recruiters will ask their job candidates if its OK to send their resume to some of their contacts and most job candidates think “sure, why not”. The problem is that you are going to get burned by this tactic. You should never allow anyone cart-blanche with your resume.
Another excuse that I hear from recruiters is that they could not get in touch with the job candidate so for the sake of time they submitted the resume. Listen, we all understand that in the contingency market it can be a race to submit a resume but when you cannot clear a job candidate then that’s just too bad. You the recruiter have no right to hurt this job candidate’s opportunities.
Some recruiters will send a resume to a company to try to get a job order. This happens a lot and they could be using your resume to do it. Did you ever get this phone call before? “Hey I got great news! ABC Company wants to interview you. I would be like “great news who said you can send my resume there”? Some recruiters will send a resume to test the waters to see if this is the type of candidate they are looking for based on a job description. I don’t have a problem with that as long as they remove the job candidates’ name, address, phone number, email address and the names of prior companies that the job candidate worked for. This allows your client to see the talent and to tell you that they would be interested in meeting this candidate, however, you have NO claims to this candidate with your client if your candidate has already been submitted. What we would do in this scenario would be to notify the contact at the company and to tell them that the candidate told us that their resume has already been submitted.
This approach of always doing what is best for our clients and our candidates seems to work well for us!